Languages of Africa

Most languages natively spoken in Africa belong to one of the two large language families that dominate the continent: Afroasiatic, or Niger–Congo. Another hundred belong to smaller families such as Ubangian, Nilotic, Saharan, and the various families previously grouped under the umbrella term Khoisan. In addition, the languages of Africa include several unclassified languages and sign languages.

The earliest Afroasiatic languages are associated with the Capsian culture, the Saharan languages are linked with the Khartoum Mesolithic/Neolithic cultures. Niger-Congo languages are correlated with the west and central African hoe-based farming traditions and the Khoisan languages are matched with the south and southeastern Wilton industries.^[8]

Afroasiatic languages

Afroasiatic languages are spoken throughout North Africa, the Horn of Africa, Western Asia and parts of the Sahel. There are approximately 375 Afroasiatic languages spoken by over 400 million people. The main subfamilies of Afroasiatic are Berber, Chadic, Cushitic, Omotic, Egyptian and Semitic. The Afroasiatic Urheimat is uncertain. The family's most extensive branch, the Semitic languages (including Arabic, Amharic and Hebrew among others), is the only branch of Afroasiatic that is spoken outside Africa.^[9]

Some of the most widely spoken Afroasiatic languages include Arabic (a Semitic language, and a recent arrival from West Asia), Somali (Cushitic), Berber (Berber), Hausa (Chadic), Amharic (Semitic) and Oromo (Cushitic). Of the world's surviving language families, Afroasiatic has the longest written history, as both the Akkadian language of Mesopotamia and Ancient Egyptian are members.

Nilo-Saharan languages

Nilo-Saharan languages are a proposed grouping of some one hundred diverse languages. Genealogical linkage between these languages has failed to be conclusively demonstrated, and support for the proposal is sparse among linguists.^[10][11] The languages share some unusual morphology, but if they are related, most of the branches must have undergone major restructuring since diverging from their common ancestor.

This hypothetical family would reach an expanse that stretches from the Nile Valley to northern Tanzania and into Nigeria and DR Congo, with the Songhay languages along the middle reaches of the Niger River as a geographic outlier. The inclusion of the Songhay languages is questionable, and doubts have been raised over the Koman, Gumuz and Kadu branches.

Some of the better known Nilo-Saharan languages are Kanuri, Fur, Songhay, Nobiin and the widespread Nilotic family, which includes the Luo, Dinka and Maasai. Most Nilo-Saharan languages are tonal, as are Niger-Congo languages.^{[citation needed]}

Niger–Congo languages

The Niger–Congo languages constitute the largest language family spoken in West Africa and perhaps the world in terms of the number of languages. One of its salient features is an elaborate noun class system with grammatical concord. A large majority of languages of this family are tonal such as Yoruba and Igbo, Akan and Ewe language. A major branch of Niger–Congo languages is the Bantu phylum, which has a wider speech area than the rest of the family (see Niger–Congo B (Bantu) in the map above).

The Niger–Kordofanian language family, joining Niger–Congo with the Kordofanian languages of south-central Sudan, was proposed in the 1950s by Joseph Greenberg. Today, linguists often use "Niger–Congo" to refer to this entire family, including Kordofanian as a subfamily. One reason for this is that it is not clear whether Kordofanian was the first branch to diverge from rest of Niger–Congo. Mande has been claimed to be equally or more divergent. Niger–Congo is generally accepted by linguists, though a few question the inclusion of Mande and Dogon, and there is no conclusive evidence for the inclusion of Ubangian.

Other language families

Several languages spoken in Africa belong to language families concentrated or originating outside the African continent.

Austronesian

Malagasy belongs to the Austronesian languages and is the westernmost branch of the family. It is the national and co-official language of Madagascar, and a Malagasy dialect called Bushi is also spoken in Mayotte.

The ancestors of the Malagasy people migrated to Madagascar around 1,500 years ago from Southeast Asia, more specifically the island of Borneo. The origins of how they arrived to Madagascar remains a mystery, however the Austronesians are known for their seafaring culture. Despite the geographical isolation, Malagasy still has strong resemblance to Barito languages especially the Ma'anyan language of southern Borneo.

With more than 20 million speakers, Malagasy is one of the most widely spoken of the Austronesian languages.

Indo-European

Afrikaans is Indo-European, as is most of the vocabulary of most African creole languages. Afrikaans evolved from the Dutch vernacular^[12][13] of South Holland (Hollandic dialect)^[14][15] spoken by the mainly Dutch settlers of what is now South Africa, where it gradually began to develop distinguishing characteristics in the course of the 18th century, including the loss of verbal conjugation (save for 5 modal verbs), as well as grammatical case and gender.^[16] Most Afrikaans speakers live in South Africa. In Namibia it is the lingua franca. Overall 15 to 20 million people are estimated to speak Afrikaans.

Since the colonial era, Indo-European languages such as Afrikaans, English, French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish have held official status in many countries, and are widely spoken, generally as lingua francas. (See African French and African Portuguese.) German was once used in Germany's colonies there from the late 1800s until World War I, when Britain and France took over and revoked German's official status. Despite this, German is still spoken in Namibia, mostly among the white population. Although it lost its official status in the 1990s, it has been redesignated as a national language. Indian languages such as Gujarati are spoken by South Asian expatriates exclusively. In earlier historical times, other Indo-European languages could be found in various parts of the continent, such as Old Persian and Greek in Egypt, Latin and Vandalic in North Africa and Modern Persian in the Horn of Africa.

Small families

The three small Khoisan families of southern Africa have not been shown to be closely related to any other major language family. In addition, there are various other families that have not been demonstrated to belong to one of these families. The classifications below follow Glottolog.

• Mande, some 70 languages, including the major languages of Mali and Guinea; these are generally thought to be divergent Niger–Congo, but debate persists
• Ubangian, some 70 languages, centered on the languages of the Central African Republic; may be Niger–Congo
• Te-Ne-Omotic, some 20 languages, previously classified under Afro-Asiatic, spoken in Ethiopia
• Khoe-Kwadi, around 10 languages, the primary family of Khoisan languages of Namibia and Botswana
• Surmic, some 11 languages, previously classified within either Sudanic or Nilo-Saharan
• Kx'a, around five languages, with various dialects, spoken in Southern Africa
• South Omotic, around five languages; previously classified within Afro-Asiatic, spoken in Ethiopia
• Tuu, or Taa-ǃKwi, two surviving languages
• Hadza, an isolate of Tanzania
• Bangime, a likely isolate of Mali
• Jalaa, a likely isolate of Nigeria
• Sandawe, an isolate of Tanzania
• Laal, a possible isolate of Chad

Khoisan is a term of convenience covering some 30 languages spoken by around 300,000–400,000 people. There are five Khoisan families that have not been shown to be related to each other: Khoe, Tuu and Kx'a, which are found mainly in Namibia and Botswana, as well as Sandawe and Hadza of Tanzania, which are language isolates. A striking feature of Khoisan languages, and the reason they are often grouped together, is their use of click consonants. Some neighbouring Bantu languages (notably Xhosa and Zulu) have clicks as well, but these were adopted from Khoisan languages. The Khoisan languages are also tonal.

Creole languages

Due partly to its multilingualism and its colonial past, a substantial proportion of the world's creole languages are to be found in Africa. Some are based on Indo-European languages (e.g. Krio from English in Sierra Leone and the very similar Pidgin in Nigeria, Ghana and parts of Cameroon; Cape Verdean Creole in Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau Creole in Guinea-Bissau and Senegal, all from Portuguese; Seychellois Creole in the Seychelles and Mauritian Creole in Mauritius, both from French); some are based on Arabic (e.g. Juba Arabic in the southern Sudan, or Nubi in parts of Uganda and Kenya); some are based on local languages (e.g. Sango, the main language of the Central African Republic); while in Cameroon a creole based on French, English and local African languages known as Camfranglais has started to become popular.

Unclassified languages

A fair number of unclassified languages are reported in Africa. Many remain unclassified simply for lack of data; among the better-investigated ones that continue to resist easy classification are:

• possibly Afroasiatic: Ongota, Gomba
• possibly Nilo-Saharan: Shabo
• possibly Niger–Congo: Jalaa, Mbre, Bayot
• unknown: Laal, Mpre

Of these, Jalaa is perhaps the most likely to be an isolate.

Less-well investigated languages include Irimba, Luo, Mawa, Rer Bare (possibly Bantu), Bete (evidently Jukunoid), Bung (unclear), Kujarge (evidently Chadic), Lufu (Jukunoid), Meroitic (possibly Afroasiatic), Oropom (possibly spurious) and Weyto (evidently Cushitic). Several of these are extinct, and adequate comparative data is thus unlikely to be forthcoming. Hombert & Philippson (2009)^[17] list a number of African languages that have been classified as language isolates at one point or another. Many of these are simply unclassified, but Hombert & Philippson believe Africa has about twenty language families, including isolates. Beside the possibilities listed above, there are:

• Aasax or Aramanik (Tanzania) (South Cushitic? contains non-Cushitic lexicon)
• Imeraguen (Mauritania) – Hassaniyya Arabic restructured on an Azêr (Soninke) base
• Kara (Fer?) (Central African Republic)
• Oblo (Cameroon) (Adamawa? Extinct?)

Roger Blench notes a couple additional possibilities:

• Defaka (Nigeria)
• Dompo (Ghana)

Below is a list of language isolates and otherwise unclassified languages in Africa, from Vossen & Dimmendaal (2020:434):^[18]

Sign languages

Many African countries have national sign languages, such as Algerian Sign Language, Tunisian Sign Language, Ethiopian Sign Language. Other sign languages are restricted to small areas or single villages, such as Adamorobe Sign Language in Ghana. Tanzania has seven, one for each of its schools for the Deaf, all of which are discouraged. Not much is known, since little has been published on these languages

Sign language systems extant in Africa include the Paget Gorman Sign System used in Namibia and Angola, the Sudanese Sign languages used in Sudan and South Sudan, the Arab Sign languages used across the Arab Mideast, the Francosign languages used in Francophone Africa and other areas such as Ghana and Tunisia, and the Tanzanian Sign languages used in Tanzania.

Throughout the long multilingual history of the African continent, African languages have been subject to phenomena like language contact, language expansion, language shift and language death. A case in point is the Bantu expansion, in which Bantu-speaking peoples expanded over most of Sub-Equatorial Africa, intermingling with Khoi-San speaking peoples from much of Southeast Africa and Southern Africa and other peoples from Central Africa. Another example is the Arab expansion in the 7th century, which led to the extension of Arabic from its homeland in Asia, into much of North Africa and the Horn of Africa.

Trade languages are another age-old phenomenon in the African linguistic landscape. Cultural and linguistic innovations spread along trade routes and languages of peoples dominant in trade developed into languages of wider communication (lingua franca). Of particular importance in this respect are Berber (North and West Africa), Jula (western West Africa), Fulfulde (West Africa), Hausa (West Africa), Lingala (Congo), Swahili (Southeast Africa), Somali (Horn of Africa) and Arabic (North Africa and Horn of Africa).

After gaining independence, many African countries, in the search for national unity, selected one language, generally the former Indo-European colonial language, to be used in government and education. However, in recent years, African countries have become increasingly supportive of maintaining linguistic diversity. Language policies that are being developed nowadays are mostly aimed at multilingualism. This presents a methodological complication when collecting data in Africa and limited literature exists. An analysis of Afrobarometer public opinion survey data of 36 countries suggested that survey interviewers and respondents could engage in various linguistic behaviors, such as code-switching during the survey.^[19] Moreover, some African countries have been considering removing their official former Indo-European colonial languages, like Mali and Burkina Faso which removed French as an official language in 2024.^[20][21]

Official languages

Afroasiatic

• Berber:
  • Berber in Morocco and Algeria^[22]
  • Tamasheq in Mali^[23]
  • Tawellemet in Mali^[23]
• Cushitic:
  • Afar in Ethiopia
  • Oromo in Ethiopia and Kenya
  • Somali in Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Djibouti
• Semitic:
  • Amharic in Ethiopia
  • Arabic in Algeria, Chad, Comoros, Djibouti, Egypt, Libya, Mauritania,^[24] Morocco, Somalia,^[25] Sudan, Tunisia and Zanzibar (Tanzania)
  • Hassaniya Arabic in Mali^[23]
  • Tigrinya in Ethiopia and Eritrea

Austronesian

• Malagasy in Madagascar

Ngbandi creole

• Sango in the Central African Republic

French Creole

• Seychelles Creole in Seychelles

Indo-European

• Afrikaans in South Africa
• English in Ghana, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, Liberia, Zambia, Malawi, Rwanda, Namibia, Seychelles, Sudan, Tanzania, Eswatini, Lesotho, and Mauritius.
• French in Benin, Burundi, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Democratic Republic of Congo, Congo, Côte d'Ivoire, Djibouti, Gabon, Guinea, Madagascar, Niger, Rwanda, Senegal, Seychelles, and Togo.^[26]
• Portuguese in Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, São Tomé and Príncipe and Equatorial Guinea.^[27]
• Spanish in Equatorial Guinea^[28]

Niger-Congo

• Bambara in Mali^[23]
• Bobo in Mali^[23]
• Bozo in Mali^[23]
• Chewa in Malawi and Zimbabwe
• Comorian in the Comoros
• Dogon in Mali^[23]
• Fula in Mali^[23]
• Kassonke in Mali^[23]
• Kongo in Angola, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Gabon, and Republic of the Congo
• Kinyarwanda in Rwanda
• Kirundi in Burundi
• Maninke in Mali^[23]
• Minyanka in Mali^[23]
• Senufo in Mali^[23]
• Sesotho in Lesotho, South Africa and Zimbabwe
• Setswana in Botswana and South Africa
• Shona, Sindebele in Zimbabwe
• Sepedi in South Africa
• Soninke in Mali^[23]
• Ndebele in South Africa^[29]
• Swahili in Tanzania, Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda
• Swati in Eswatini (Swaziland) and South Africa
• Tsonga in South Africa
• Venda in South Africa
• Xhosa in South Africa
• Zulu in South Africa

Nilo-Saharan

• Songhay in Mali^[23]

Cross-border languages

The colonial borders established by European powers following the Berlin Conference in 1884–1885 divided a great many ethnic groups and African language speaking communities. This can cause divergence of a language on either side of a border (especially when the official languages are different), for example, in orthographic standards. Some notable cross-border languages include Berber (which stretches across much of North Africa and some parts of West Africa), Kikongo (that stretches across northern Angola, western and coastal Democratic Republic of the Congo, and western and coastal Republic of the Congo), Somali (stretches across most of the Horn of Africa), Swahili (spoken in the African Great Lakes region), Fula (in the Sahel and West Africa) and Luo (in Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, South Sudan and Sudan).

Some prominent Africans such as former Malian president and former Chairman of the African Commission, Alpha Oumar Konaré, have referred to cross-border languages as a factor that can promote African unity.^[33]

Language change and planning

Language is not static in Africa any more than on other continents.^{[citation needed]} In addition to the (likely modest) impact of borders, there are also cases of dialect levelling (such as in Igbo and probably many others), koinés (such as N'Ko and possibly Runyakitara) and emergence of new dialects (such as Sheng). In some countries, there are official efforts to develop standardized language versions.

There are also many less widely spoken languages that may be considered endangered languages.

Demographics

Of the 1 billion Africans (in 2009), about 17 percent speak an Arabic dialect.^{[citation needed]} About 10 percent speak Swahili,^{[citation needed]} the lingua franca of Southeast Africa; about 5 percent speak a Berber dialect;^{[citation needed]} and about 5 percent speak Hausa, which serves as a lingua franca in much of the Sahel. Other large West African languages are Yoruba, Igbo, Akan and Fula. Major Horn of Africa languages are Somali, Amharic and Oromo. Lingala is important in Central Africa. Important South African languages are Sotho, Tswana, Pedi, Venda, Tsonga, Swazi, Southern Ndebele, Zulu, Xhosa and Afrikaans.^[34]

French, English and Portuguese are important languages in Africa. About 320 million,^[35][36] 240 million and 35 million Africans, respectively, speak them as either native or secondary languages. Portuguese has become the national language of Angola and São Tomé and Príncipe, and Portuguese is the official language of Mozambique. The economies of Angola and Mozambique are quickly becoming economic powerhouses in Africa.^[37]

Some linguistic features are particularly common among languages spoken in Africa, whereas others are less common. Such shared traits probably are not due to a common origin of all African languages. Instead, some may be due to language contact (resulting in borrowing) and specific idioms and phrases may be due to a similar cultural background.

Phonological

Some widespread phonetic features include:

• certain types of consonants, such as implosives (/ɓa/), ejectives (/kʼa/), the labiodental flap and in southern Africa, clicks (/ǂa/, /ᵑǃa/). True implosives are rare outside Africa, and clicks and the flap almost unheard of.
• doubly articulated labial-velar stops like /k͡pa/ and /ɡ͡ba/ are found in places south of the Sahara.
• prenasalized consonants, like /mpa/ and /ŋɡa/, are widespread in Africa but not common outside it.
• sequences of stops and fricatives at the beginnings of words, such as /fsa/, /pta/ and /dt͡sk͡xʼa/.
• nasal stops which only occur with nasal vowels, such as [ba] vs. [mã] (but both [pa] and [pã]), especially in West Africa.
• vowels contrasting an advanced or retracted tongue, commonly called "tense" and "lax".
• simple tone systems which are used for grammatical purposes.

Sounds that are relatively uncommon in African languages include uvular consonants, diphthongs and front rounded vowels

Tonal languages are found throughout the world but are especially common in Africa - in fact, there are far more tonal than non-tonal languages in Africa. Both the Nilo-Saharan and the Khoi-San phyla are fully tonal. The large majority of the Niger–Congo languages are also tonal. Tonal languages are also found in the Omotic, Chadic and South & East Cushitic branches of Afroasiatic. The most common type of tonal system opposes two tone levels, High (H) and Low (L). Contour tones do occur, and can often be analysed as two or more tones in succession on a single syllable. Tone melodies play an important role, meaning that it is often possible to state significant generalizations by separating tone sequences ("melodies") from the segments that bear them. Tonal sandhi processes like tone spread, tone shift, downstep and downdrift are common in African languages.

Syntactic

Widespread syntactical structures include the common use of adjectival verbs and the expression of comparison by means of a verb 'to surpass'. The Niger–Congo languages have large numbers of genders (noun classes) which cause agreement in verbs and other words. Case, tense and other categories may be distinguished only by tone. Auxiliary verbs are also widespread among African languages; the fusing of subject markers and TAM/polarity auxiliaries into what are known as tense pronouns are more common in auxiliary verb constructions in African languages than in most other parts of the world.^[38]

Semantic

Quite often, only one term is used for both animal and meat; the word nama or nyama for animal/meat is particularly widespread in otherwise widely divergent African languages.^{[citation needed]}

The following is a table displaying the number of speakers of given languages within Africa:

By region

Below is a list of the major languages of Africa by region, family and total number of primary language speakers in millions.

General

• Writing systems of Africa
• Journal of West African Languages
• List of extinct languages of Africa

Works

• Polyglotta Africana
• The Languages of Africa

Classifiers

• Karl Lepsius
• Lionel Bender
• Wilhelm Bleek
• Christopher Ehret
• Carl Meinhof
• Diedrich Westermann
• Joseph Greenberg

Colonial and migratory influences

• Arabization
• Asian Africans
• Dutch Language Union
• French West Africa
• German colonization of Africa
• Islamization of Egypt
• Italian East Africa — including Italian Ethiopia
• Italian North Africa
• North African Arabs
• Maghrebi Arabic — via Muslim conquest of the Maghreb
• Portuguese language in Africa — predominant in Portuguese-speaking African countries
• Spanish Guinea — presently Equatorial Guinea
• Spanish West Africa
• Spanish North Africa
• West African Pidgin English
• White Africans of European ancestry

• Childs, George Tucker (2003). An Introduction to African Languages. Amsterdam: John Benjamin. ISBN 9781588114211. OCLC 52766015.
• Chimhundu, Herbert (2002). Language Policies in Africa (PDF). Intergovernmental Conference on Language Policies in Africa (Revised ed.). Harare: UNESCO. Archived from the original (PDF) on 16 May 2017.
• Cust, Robert Needham (1883). Modern Languages of Africa.
• Ellis, Stephen, ed. (1996). Africa Now: People, Policies, and Institutions. Ministry of Foreign Affairs (DGIS). ISBN 9780435089870.
• Elugbe, Ben (1998). "Cross-border and major languages of Africa". In Legère, K. (ed.). Cross-border Languages: Reports and Studies, Regional Workshop on Cross-Border Languages, National Institute for Educational Development (NIED), Okahandja, 23–27 September 1996. Windhoek: Gamsberg Macmillan.
• Ethnologue.com's Africa: A listing of African languages and language families.
• Greenberg, Joseph H. (1983). "Some areal characteristics of African languages". In Dihoff, Ivan R. (ed.). Current Approaches to African Linguistics. Publications in African Languages and Linguistics. Vol. 1. Dordrecht: Foris. pp. 3–21.
• Greenberg, Joseph H. (1966). The Languages of Africa (2nd ed.). Bloomington: Indiana University.
• Heine, Bernd; Nurse, Derek, eds. (2000). African Languages: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Webb, Vic; Kembo-Sure, eds. (1998). African Voices: An Introduction to the Languages and Linguistics of Africa. Cape Town: Oxford University Press Southern Africa.
• Westphal, E.O.J. (1963). "The Linguistic Prehistory of Southern Africa: Bush, Kwadi, Hottentot, and Bantu Linguistic Relationships". Africa. 33 (3): 237–265. doi:10.2307/1157418. JSTOR 1157418. S2CID 143635864.

• one of the largest online resources for African languages at Mofeko
• African language resources for children Archived 3 August 2015 at the Wayback Machine
• Web resources for African languages
• Linguistic maps of Africa from Muturzikin.com
• Online Dictionaries, e-books and other online fulltexts in or on African languages